"'There's muckle adae when cadgers ride,'" Mrs. Douglas quoted. "And it was a great undertaking. I didn't in the least want to go, but your father was as keen as a schoolboy, and I couldn't let him go alone, and I couldn't leave Davie, so the three of us went. Mark had gone to London and was settled in his rooms in the Temple. Robbie and Jim were studying, and you had invitations to fill up all the time."
"I only visited between the boys' vacations, then we were all together at Uncle Bob's. What angels he and Aunt Katharine were to us! The rest of the time I paid visits, and very nearly had a bad nervous breakdown through having to be consistently pleasant for nine months at a stretch. You see, I stayed with such very different people, and the effort to adjust myself to each in turn was rather wearing. When the boys went back for the summer term, Uncle Bob took Aunt Katharine and me over to Touraine. We stayed at Tours, and made expeditions all round to the lovely old châteaux, and came home by Paris and London and finished up at Oxford for Eights' Week. Wasn't it kind of Uncle Bob? Oh, I do wish all the nice people weren't dead! Each one that goes takes so much of the light away with him.... You didn't regret taking the trip, Mother?"
"Not for a minute, except, perhaps, when Davie supped a whole tin of condensed milk and nearly perished, and your father was poisoned by a mosquito bite and was blind for two days. It did me a world of good to come across people who had never heard of the United Free Church of Scotland and who had no desire to hear about it, and who interested me enormously by the way they looked at life. Mark always used to tell me that with me journeys ended in Mothers' Meetings, and I was too much like that. I hadn't, perhaps, realised that people might be opposed to everything I thought right and proper and yet be good people. I worried a good deal about you children at home--it wouldn't have been me if I hadn't had a trouble--but your father and Davie were blissfully happy."
"You wrote splendid letters," said Ann, "telling every detail. Father hated writing letters--we used to tell him that he would rather walk five miles than write a p.c.--and his efforts were quite short and chiefly confined to statements such as: 'What a beautiful blue the ocean is'; 'the veldt is much what I thought it would be.' Davie wrote delicious letters on oily scraps of paper--oily because he was generally anointed with a lotion for mosquito bites--which invariably ended: 'Now I must finch up.' He never ceased to mourn the little mongoose that died before he could bring it home, but he did fetch a giant tortoise, which snowked about at Etterick until a specially cold winter finished it. And you brought home a gorgeous fur rug and piles of ostrich feathers. How did you collect so many presents?"